If you’re a follower of my blog, you know by now that i’m a big fan of Vsauce (YouTube) because he makes some awesome, brain-twisting videos. Well, he’s back to melt your brain with another great video. Enjoy 🙂

“Thanks for calling out the troll. I’ll make sure to get him”
–Vani Hari, when asked why she’s selling products containing the dyes Yellow 5 and Blue 1

I, Mark Alsip, am the troll referred to in Vani Hari’s quote (above). We had an interesting encounter yesterday on Periscope. After being encouraged to ask questions, I very politely and respectfully queried Hari on three products she’s selling. I wanted to know why certain of her wares contain nearly a dozen different chemicals she’s specifically called out as “toxic”.

If you’re already aware of Vani’s tactics, you probably won’t be surprised I was banned instantly. However, for those in the Food Babe Army (or the media) who don’t believe that Hari censors all dissenting comment and immediately bans those who point out her gaffes, presented below are video, screen captures, links to Food Babe’s product labels (with ingredient lists), and more…

There are all these weird noises too! What does it all mean? The Apocalypse? Well if you buy into tabloids, and religious and conspiracy sites hype (specifically from the WND site), it sounds like the End. But we doubt it. While it may sound sciencey on the surface, such claims are a bunch of pseudoscientific nonsense. So you can stop worrying, really. OK, here’s the reasoning.

In early September, we told you about reverend John Hagee who was promoting his new book on the end times culminating with the “Blood Moon” concocted scare to happen on September 27-28. As we noted then,

Prophecy isn’t real.

Religion is not science.

Hagee is selling a book, encouraging fear to bring people to his brand of religion.

There is no natural reason why the end of the world has anything to do with this date.

There have been 62 tetrads since the first century, these are natural cycles, nothing special.

A story about the END OF THE WORLD!!! is guaranteed click-bait. Jewish mystics and Christian End Times evangelists promoting this view cite various recent catastrophes (drought, fires, volcanoes and earthquakes), increased murder rates [only in some cities], gay marriage legalization, signs in the sky, and Pope Francis’ visit to the US now as signals of the return of Jesus. Bookies are taking bets; I can’t quite figure how those will pay out.

The military exercise Jade Helm 15 concluded earlier this week without the much-discussed government takeover that conspiracy theorists had warned was imminent.

The eight-week training exercise, organized by the Army’s Special Operations Command, was designed to give Green Berets and other special forces realistic war game experience. It was conducted in seven states though its presence was best known in Texas, where conspiracy theorists claimed it was part of an (apparently not-so-secret) government plot to, variously, impose martial law, establish an infrastructure for mass detentions and murders, take away America’s guns, or set the stage for some other unspecified but assuredly nefarious action.

Rumors spread that trains were being set up to transport political enemies of the Obama administration to detention camps, and that cold storage facilities were being commandeered as makeshift morgues to warehouse thousands of dead bodies that were expected to litter the countryside. WalMarts were said to have been suddenly and mysteriously closed, possibly in collaboration with the Pentagon for warehousing people or supplies. The myth debunking site Snopes.com handily debunked the rumors, noting for example that “This theory doesn’t account for why WalMart stores in states far outside the geographic range of the Jade Helm exercises (e.g., Florida, Oklahoma) should also be closed.”

[. . .]

Spawning Conspiracy Theories

One reason the conspiracy theories were plausible, at least initially, is that there was a grain of truth to the claims. The story was not made up of whole cloth. The existence of the Jade Helm 15 operation could not be denied — nor was it denied. The question was instead one of motivation, an assumption that the “official story” reason for the training exercise was false and that there must be a hidden agenda or real purpose behind the program.

Zipf’s law states that given some corpus of natural language utterances, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. Thus the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, etc. (More . . .)

Got it? After watching this video you will either feel brilliant or totally confused. 🙂

The emails were adamant. Everyone wanted me to undergo cryotherapy: step into a -260°F stall, alone and naked, for three minutes, and feel the toxins flutter away into the ether.

No thanks, I thought. I am a cold wuss. I grew up in Los Angeles, where anything below 80°F is cool and below 70°F is downright cold. Not to mention that even here in Hollywood, I am always the person to ask whether anyone has an extra sweater before we go into an air-conditioned movie theatre. I didn’t seem like a good candidate for experimental hypothermia.

Yet we got the request so many times that my curiosity grew. The frightening-sounding treatment has been on the rise the last few years, with The New York Times noting the increase in athletes who used it in 2011. Since then, companies offering the service have sprouted up, especially in Los Angeles, where alternative therapies abound. Earlier this year, The Atlantic released a video about their medical-doctor-turned-editor-in-chief trying out cryotherapy. He was willing to do it, despite the practitioner telling him that some brave partakers got frostbite. If a doctor could summon the courage, couldn’t I? With a little encouragement from my podcast host Ross, and seeing that the whole experience totaled out at three minutes, I decided to give it a shot, even though those three minutes would cost $65.

Trolls told Chris Hurst that his grief over losing his girlfriend in the Roanoke murders was a lie. But I’ve known him for years. Maybe, I thought, I could get them to listen.

On August 26, 2015, reporter Alison Parker, 24, and cameraman Adam Ward, 27, were both shot and killed on live television.

Chris Hurst spent the last two weeks trying not to cry on television while telling the world how beautiful his life with his girlfriend was before she was murdered for no reason. Chris was the boyfriend of Alison Parker, who was shot and killed on live television in August by a mentally ill man who had an invented grudge and easy access to firearms.

Chris is a friend from college. Chris and I hosted a radio show together.

Or, according to millions of conspiracy theorists online, Chris Hurst is a part of my imagination.

In the minds—and YouTube videos—of some conspiracy theorists, Chris is not a news anchor at WDBJ in Virginia. Chris, the videos say, is a “crisis actor” invented less than a month ago by the United States government as part of a false flag operation that will eventually allow the New World Order to take away every American citizen’s guns and force them into a life of subjugation and tyranny.

Every day now, Chris wakes up to find strangers’ hate on his Facebook wall that he has to personally delete. Or he’ll Google Alison to find the people he has to thank for donating to her scholarships and he’ll see, instead, another conspiracy theory YouTube video, viewed 800,000 times over, that says Alison was in on it all along, and that she’s been given a new life and maybe plastic surgery by the government.

“It happened again about an hour ago,” Chris says. “It’s hard for me to manage that because I hit land mines when I do. They have all these details I don’t want to know.

The most recent one says Alison was dating someone else and that she and Chris were never together at all. That person is really Alison’s ex-boyfriend, who conspiracists found by looking through her old Facebook photos.

Two weeks after he lost the love of his life in the most gruesome and devastating way imaginable, this is what he has to sit through when he turns on his computer each morning.

“The hoax theories have taken a toll for sure,” he says. “I’ve definitely felt it more than anyone. I’m the one with the Facebook and Twitter page.”

It is simply easier for some people to believe that the United States government has concocted a vast conspiracy to take away all of our guns than it is to believe that it is too easy for a mentally ill person to acquire one and shoot anyone they want.

And now those same people are taking it out on the families of the victims of gun violence after a tragedy.

The last decade has seen a boon for “crisis actor” conspiracies on the Web and—along with them—a new set of psychologists and philosophers are trying to understand how people get dragged so far away from reality.

IMAGINE, for a moment that the awful terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were in fact a conspiracy. That they were an inside job.

Conspiracy believers tell you that no buildings had ever previously fallen because of fire. One, this is a complete lie. Two, were there ever fires caused by jetfuel in buildings massively weakened by the impact of two huge planes? Source: News Corp Australia

Imagine that the Twin Towers were detonated rather than just fell. Imagine that the Twin Towers had been deliberately wired up for destruction and collapsed from the top down, even though buildings wired for demolition always collapse from the bottom.

Now imagine the legions of people who would’ve had to spend months, completely undetected, concealing tonnes of explosives in the two towers to generate enough explosive force to take down both buildings. Imagine those people performing this sinister covert work despite the security and sniffer dogs which had been permanently stationed on site ever since the Trade Center truck bombing in 1993.

Keep imagining. Imagine that the plane which struck the Pentagon was, as some claim, a missile. Overlook the fact that a hijacked civilian aircraft, which was clearly visible on the radar at the Pentagon, completely disappeared off the radar right at the moment the Pentagon was impacted by the ‘missile’.

Imagine these and many other incredible acts of stealth and coincidence. And now consider this. That no American, in 14 years, has ever come forward to admit it. That not a single one of the tens of thousands of people required to orchestrate the greatest attack on American soil has ever felt guilty about it, or been moved to speak for any reason.

Consider that not one of these people, not one, ever felt moved to spill the beans because they were broke and thought they could make money with a book or movie deal.

Ask yourself whether you truly believe that so many Americans would be evil enough, compliant enough, covert enough and efficient enough to pull an operation like this off without detection.

Or is it more likely, perhaps, that a small group of 19 men, trained and led by a well-funded international terrorist organisation, were better placed to organise the operation undetected.

Ask yourself that question, and then ask yourself this.

Did a man widely considered to be the least intelligent US president of all time really have the capacity to organise this? And if so, why? Plenty of previous US presidents had mobilised the military in the Middle East and beyond without murdering 2,973 of their own citizens.

Why concoct such a fiendishly intricate plot? To what end?

These are the questions conspiracy theorists won’t answer. Because they can’t. Because no one can.

Some people believe that airplane contrails are really the government spraying us with poison. Could this be true?

There are at least three possibilities: contrails are the normal and expected result of fuel-burning planes flying at high altitude; all trails left in the sky by planes must be the result of the covert spraying of chemicals; or some contrails are natural, and some are chemtrails.

The first one we know for sure. When a hydrocarbon fuel burns in air, water is the largest byproduct by mass. At low pressures at altitudes higher than 25,000 feet and temperatures less than -40 degrees, water vapor always condenses into cloud; or anytime the addition of this small amount pushes the humidity past the saturation point. So in any given set of atmospheric conditions, all planes will either produce a condensation trail or not.

But what if the government wants to spray chemicals into the atmosphere, according to the popular urban legend? Is spraying from airliner altitude an effective way to do it? There are good science-based reasons why this wouldn’t work.

Don’t you wish you could shoot lightning bolds out of your hand, too?Does Emperor Palpatine know about this guy?

You’d think that after all these years combatting quackery and blogging about science in medicine (and, unfortunately, pseudoscience in medicine) it would take a lot to shock me. You’d be right. On the other hand, Even now, 15 years after I discovered quackery in a big way on Usenet and ten years after the inception of this blog, I still have enough hope in humanity that even when I come across men like Jerry Sargeant, a.k.a. The Facilitator I am still capable of utter wonder that someone would advertise something as reprehensible and/or deluded as this. I half wondered if it were performance art, but in reality I don’t think it is. I wanted to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all (and in fact I did), but look at the screenshot from his blog above and the photos on Sargeant’s website. It’s as if the dude thinks he’s Doctor Strange, or maybe Harry Potter, or perhaps Gandalf the Grey. I mean, seriously! Emperor Palpatine called, and he wants his lightning bolts back! The guy portrays himself manipulating bolts of electricity, as he makes claims that he can “radically transform your life.”

Of that, I have no doubt, but not in the way Sargeant means. I’m sure patients’ lives are “radically transformed” by wasting huge sums of money on the fantasy magic medicine that is portrayed on that page. Naturally, as is frequently the case for various dubious healers, Sargeant has a “St. Paul on the way to Damascus” moment to relate:

When Jerry Sargeant woke to a loud crash and flying glass in the passenger seat of a taxi cab in Romania, on his way to the airport, he had no idea it would be the birthing process that led him to discover an amazing healing ability.

‘My families safety were all I was thinking about. The taxi was swaying backwards and forwards all over the road. It was crazy. It turned out we had hit two ladies crossing the road and the first lady came through the windscreen, hit me in the head as I was asleep, got sucked back out of the car and landed in the road. I don’t know whether it was the bang in the head or me seeing her soul hovering over her body once I got out of the car that kick started these abilities – maybe it was both’.

This story, of course, tells us very little, other than that Sargeant, assuming he’s telling the truth, was in a cab in Romania when it hit two women. I presume that at least one of them died, given the story about seeing her soul “hovering over her body.” Funny how he doesn’t mention explicitly what happened to them. Did they die? Did they live? Apparently it doesn’t matter; to him they were just a means to his wonderful “powers”! These powers, according to Sargeant, began to manifest . . .

Most Conspiracy Theories are stupid. By the power of the internet they spread like wildfire and often poison discussions. But there is hope – we developed a way to debunk conspiracies in just a few seconds…

Biblical prophecy watchers, apocalypse predictors, rapture preachers, and doomsday preppers are buzzing about an upcoming day that might finally usher in the End of the World As We Know It: September 23, 2015. This is supposedly the day that a confluence of events, both political and scientific, is going to herald the destruction of humanity.

Oh man, not broken down cars!

It’s clear that in prophecy circles, this is a big deal. A search for “September 23 2015 apocalypse” brings up 11 million hits. References to the “events of September, 2015” are all over major conspiracy websites, talking about everything from rapture to asteroids to aliens to Biblical blood moons. YouTube is brimming with videos showing “the signs” of what’s about to happen. Even Isaac Newton is said to have prophesied the end of the world for this date.

So what’s going to happen that day? What are the sources of these prophecies? And most importantly, should you be worried?

Let’s start with what’s being predicted for September 23, 2015 – and for September 2015 in general. According to various conspiracy, prophecy, and prepping websites, the following things will happen on the date itself:

Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement.

President Barack Obama is scheduled to meet with Pope Francis at the White House. Of note is that Francis is the 266th Pope, September 23 is the 266th day of the year, and the average length of human gestation is 266 days.

The Autumnal Equinox.

The First day of the Muslim holiday Eid al-Adha, also known as “the Feast of the Sacrifice.”

A range of dates that Comet 67P is scheduled to make an extremely close passage of Earth, September 15-28.

The September restart of the CERN Large Hadron Collider will open a portal to another dimension.

The end of Jade Helm 15 on September 15.

The September 25th launch of a new UN initiative, Agenda 2030, which signals the end stage of Agenda 21 implementation.

The date of the last of the “Four Blood Moons” heralding the End Times, on September 28.

The approximate date of predicted economic collapse.

The end of a Shemitah year in the Jewish Calendar, the last year of the seven year agricultural cycle, that traditionally brings with it great tribulation.

All of these events have been prophesied to form a combination that will bring on the End Times. What are the sources of these predictions?

Damn you, Ned Flanders! Damn you!

The obvious confluence of the three major world religions on September 23.

Biblical prophecy, specifically the “Four Blood Moons” prophecy.

The End Times prophecy of Sir Isaac Newton.

A dire warning from French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who claimed on May 13, 2014 that we have “500 days to avoid climate chaos.” 500 days after May 13, 2014 is September 24, 2015.

Prophetic dreams and visions by people attuned to such things.

Predictive programming in Hollywood entertainment – specifically, many uses of the numbers “9” and “23” in films and TV.

If all of this is correct, September 2015 is going to be a spectacularly bad month for humanity, with climactic, scientific, economic, and godly chaos brought down upon us. So stock up on beans, guns, and guns that shoot beans, because we’re in for it.

Except skeptics don’t think like this. We don’t see omens and prophecy and rumor, grab our bug-out bags and head for the bunker. We grab our facts and head for the…facts bunker.

What They Haven’t Told You about Climate Change

Since time immemorial, our climate has been and will always be changing. Patrick Moore explains why “climate change,” far from being a recent human-caused disaster, is, for a myriad of complex reasons, a fact of life on Planet Earth.

The Truth about CO2

Global Warming activists will tell you that CO2 is bad and dangerous. The EPA has even classified it as a pollutant. But is it? Patrick Moore provides some surprising facts about the benefits of CO2 that you won’t hear in the current debate.